By Liz Kingsley

Featured Image: “Pattern from L’ornoment Polychrome” by Albert Racinet

First he slept with someone else and later while he was busy sleeping, she slept
with someone else. No, before he slept with someone else, she slept with the
lawyer across the street who gave good oral argument. She did not tell him
about the lawyer. Their time together was privileged and she knew her rights.
While she was with the lawyer, he slept with the decorator. When she found out
about the decorator, she confronted him and said I trust that you know about
the lawyer. He said he in fact did not know about the lawyer, but that now he
no longer trusted her. She said that she had stopped trusting him after a flirty
consultation they had with the decorator about their living room, which is why
she slept with the lawyer in the first place. He said she had no reason not to
trust him, but that he sensed she didn’t, so he figured he might as well go ahead
and sleep with the decorator. She said that’s exactly why she can’t trust him
anymore. He slept with the decorator on the outgoing living room sofa. She
said the lawyer has a trust account, into which she deposited the money they
were planning to pay the decorator for the incoming living room sofa because
she didn’t trust him to go through with the renovation in light of their domestic
destruction.

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Liz Kingsley is a poet and the Administrative Director of The Writers Studio. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The McNeese Review, The Round, Euphony, Exit 13, and (M)othering Anthology. Her fiction has appeared in The William and Mary Review. Her personal essays have been published in New Jersey Family Magazine and the anthology Blended: Writers on the Stepfamily Experience. She received Pushcart Prize nominations in 2013 and 2019.

Originally appeared in NOR 11.